To allow work at home or not, that is the question

By Rhonda AbramsGannett

Thursday

Feb 28, 2013 at 8:34 AM

Small-business owners may have felt a familiar pang this week.Yahoo’s new chief executive, Marissa Mayer, received scorching criticism for her decision banning all work from home arrangements — telecommuting. Her demand that every employee show up at the office set off a firestorm.Is she a savvy, tough, businesswoman taking necessary steps to turn around an ailing company, or a regressive, parent-hating throwback?To small-business owners and entrepreneurs, the question of whether or not to allow employees to work from home long been has perplexing. (Full disclosure: I have Yahoo! stock but less than 200 shares.)I’m not talking about small businesses that clearly need workers at their place of business. If you run a restaurant, your waiters and cooks obviously must show up.But do you need your marketing person or bookkeeper or even administrative assistant to be physically present? What if they will quit — or won’t accept your job offer — unless they can work from home a few days a week?After all, many people prefer to work from home. It avoids the cost of commuting and gives parents flexibility. From an employer’s point of view, home workers with well-defined tasks sometimes can be more productive, not spending time on workplace chit-chat.But that chit-chat may turn out to be valuable.Many innovative companies intentionally design workplaces to increase staff interaction, recognizing that new ideas are more likely to be generated by collaboration and that problems be solved quicker face to face.“I get more done working at home,” when the kids aren’t there, said one of my contractors, Anne Marie Bonneau. “But after several days, I start to feel isolated. I like coming in and getting ideas and then thinking about them, working on them at home.” For entrepreneurial start-ups, working together is particularly critical.“We always muse about three guys in a garage creating the next Apple or Facebook. Did you ever notice it’s never three guys in three separate garages?” said CEO Nick Balletta of TalkPoint, a webcasting company in New York. When you’re new, you need energy, speed, and collaboration.Years ago, I launched a start-up with a partner located at a distance, and one of our main problems was a lack of enough face time to resolve differences.In my company, we’ve found that working on a project together, closing ourselves in the conference room, can often be more productive than working separately.“When we work together in lockdown, we get a lot more done than we could individually,” Bonneau said.We also institute “library hours” in the office — a completely open environment — so we don’t chat but work quietly on our tasks.When considering telecommuting options for your small business, consider:The pros:— More choice of workers. Out-of-area workers, parents, people who want to work from home.— Lower overhead. Less office space, lower energy bills, supplies, etc.— More productivity. With clearly defined, measurable tasks, such as sales, calls made, and the like.The cons:— Less control. In the office, you can see how and when employees are working.— Less productivity. At-home workers can be distracted with personal tasks.— Less communication and cohesion. When workers are scattered, it’s harder to build a sense of “team.” — Less innovation. You need to bounce ideas off one another to generate new concepts.Another challenge for small businesses is that home workers take more time to manage.It’s easy to check on an employee in the same room. With home workers, you have to arrange conference calls, send emails and set up project-management systems.Small-business owners rarely have the human-resources personnel.I suspect that, at the end of the day, most small-business owners decide that they want their payroll employees to show up in the office. If a worker typically can complete tasks at home, why not use an independent contractor if you can do so legally?Perhaps most important, working together produces “serendipity” — finding something wonderful that you’re not necessarily looking for.For instance, as I was writing this in the office, my administrative assistant asked me a question about a routine customer inquiry. She wouldn’t have bothered me with this if I were working from home.A distraction, right? Yes, but ... her question led to us generating an idea to improve one of our products.Serendipity, you can’t get that telecommuting.

Rhonda Abrams is president of The Planning Shop and publisher of books for entrepreneurs. Her most recent book is “Entrepreneurship: A Real-World Approach.” Register for Rhonda’s free newsletter at PlanningShop.com. Twitter: @RhondaAbrams. Facebook: facebook.com/RhondaAbramsSmallBusiness.

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